Water quality and risk assessment of dug wells: a case study for a poor community in the city of São Paulo, Brazil

Sparsely populated areas, or peripheral communities commonly lack access to a public water supply and sewerage systems. The inhabitants of these areas must make use of excavated wells to provide their water needs, and cesspits for domestic wastewater disposal. These on-site sanitation systems can release pathogens and nutrients into shallow groundwater. These poor communities urgently require cheap and efficient techniques for the detection of sanitary conditions, in order to prevent contamination of the water resources supplied by dug wells. The sanitary risk assessment methodology, applied in an irregular settlement south of the city of São Paulo, was based on a questionnaire with yes/no questions (risk factors), which allowed the identification of problems related to the well construction and operation, and the presence of potential contamination sources in its vicinity. These risk factors were compared against nitrate and bacterial analysis using the clustering statistical method, to verify the relationship between contamination and certain aspects surveyed in the questionnaire. Questions that were more related to contaminated wells were those concerning the presence of cover and its integrity; gaps between mouth and cover; the surrounding pavement and presence of ground irregularities; infiltration in the well casing; water-suspended materials; and proximity to contamination sources. Contamination models based on variograms allowed to observe that bacterial contamination presented a strong localized component, which was associated frequently with the way residents handled the wells, whereas nitrate contamination was related more to a regional (spatial) component; that is, the distance between wells and cesspits.     

Optimal station keeping by electric propulsion with thrust operation constraints

The orbit of a geostationary satellite has to be corrected from time to time in order to compensate for the effects of various perturbations. This is usually done by means of a system of thrusters mounted on the satellite. In this paper a method is developed to find the optimal thrusting strategy for the case of an electric propulsion system under given limitations on thrust magnitude and operation times. Optimization techniques are applied to minimize a cost function which is a weighted combination of fuel consumption and station keeping errors.Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Mathematical Methods in Celestial Mechanics held at Oberwolfach (West Germany) from 14 to 19 August, 1978.     

Evidence for cyclotron maser emission from the Sun and stars

In recent years radiation has been observed from planets, Sun and stars that is best explained by the cyclotron maser instability; in fact, all celestial bodies that might feasibly emit and be detected by their cyclotron maser radiation have been detected. Here we review those observations, the developments in the theory, the recent work on the effiency of energy transfer by cyclotron maser radiation, and some recent and future observations that might demonstrate whether the mechanism is energetically important in solar and stellar flares.This work was supported in part by NASA's Solar Heliospheric Physics and Solar Terrestrial Theory Programs under grants NSG-7287 and NAGW-91 to the University of Colorado. The numerical simulations were performed on the Cray XMP at the San Diego Supercomputer Center which is funded by the National Science Foundation.     

Design principles for origin-destination flow maps

Origin-destination flow maps are often difficult to read due to overlapping flows. Cartographers have developed design principles in manual cartography for origin-destination flow maps to reduce overlaps and increase readability. These design principles are identified and documented using a quantitative content analysis of 97 geographic origin-destination flow maps without branching or merging flows. The effectiveness of selected design principles is verified in a user study with 215 participants. Findings show that (a) curved flows are more effective than straight flows, (b) arrows indicate direction more effectively than tapered line widths, and (c) flows between nodes are more effective than flows between areas. These findings, combined with results from user studies in graph drawing, conclude that effective and efficient origin-destination flow maps should be designed according to the following design principles: overlaps between flows are minimized; symmetric flows are preferred to asymmetric flows; longer flows are curved more than shorter or peripheral flows; acute angles between crossing flows are avoided; sharp bends in flow lines are avoided; flows do not pass under unconnected nodes; flows are radially distributed around nodes; flow direction is indicated with arrowheads; and flow width is scaled with represented quantity.     

Wheat growth profile: satellite monitoring and crop yield modelling

The most important advantage of the low resolution National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (NOAA AVHRR) data is its high temporal frequency and high radiometric sensitivity which helps in vegetation detection in the visible and near-infrared spectral regions. In areas where most of the crop cultivation is in large contiguous areas, and if the AVHRR data are selected for time period such that the crop of interest is well discriminated from other crops, these data can be used for monitoring vegetative growth and condition very effectively. The present study deals with the application of AVHRR data for the monitoring of the wheat crop in its seventeen main growing districts of the Rajasthan state. The fourteen date AVHRR data covering the entire growth period have been used to generate the normalized difference vegetation index (NDV1) growth profile for the crop by masking the non-crop pixels following the two-date NDVI change method. The growth profile parameters and other derived parameters, such as post-anthesis senescence rate and areas under the entire growth profile or under selected growth periods have been related to the district average wheat yield through statistical regression models. Various methods adopted for wheat pixels masking have been critically evaluated. It is found that the wheat yield can be predicted well by the area under the profile in different growth periods.     

Use of cartographic images by expert and novice field geologists in planning fieldwork routes

Topographic maps and aerial photographs are particularly useful when geoscientists are faced with fieldwork tasks such as selecting paths for observation, establishing sampling schemes, or defining field regions. These types of images are crucial in bedrock geologic mapping, a cognitively complex field-based problem-solving task. Geologic mapping requires the geologist to correctly identify rock types and three-dimensional bedrock structures from often partial or poor-quality outcrop data while navigating through unfamiliar terrain. This paper compares the walked routes of novice to expert geologists working in the field (n = 66) with the results of a route planning and navigation survey of a similar population of geologists (n = 77). Results show clearly that those geologists with previous mapping experience make quick and decisive determinations about field areas from available imagery and maps, regardless of whether they are or not physically present in the field area. Recognition of geologic features enabled experts to form and verbalize a specific plan for travel through a landscape based on those features. Novices were less likely to develop specific travel route plans and were less likely to identify critical landscape cues from aerial photographs.     

Strategies to mitigate aliasing of loading signals while estimating GPS frame parameters

Although GNSS techniques are theoretically sensitive to the Earth center of mass, it is often preferable to remove intrinsic origin and scale information from the estimated station positions since they are known to be affected by systematic errors. This is usually done by estimating the parameters of a linearized similarity transformation which relates the quasi-instantaneous frames to a long-term frame such as the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF). It is well known that non-linear station motions can partially alias into these parameters. We discuss in this paper some procedures that may allow reducing these aliasing effects in the case of the GPS techniques. The options include the use of well-distributed sub-networks for the frame transformation estimation, the use of site loading corrections, a modification of the stochastic model by downweighting heights, or the joint estimation of the low degrees of the deformation field. We confirm that the standard approach consisting of estimating the transformation over the whole network is particularly harmful for the loading signals if the network is not well distributed. Downweighting the height component, using a uniform sub-network, or estimating the deformation field perform similarly in drastically reducing the amplitude of the aliasing effect. The application of these methods to reprocessed GPS terrestrial frames permits an assessment of the level of agreement between GPS and our loading model, which is found to be about 1.5 mm WRMS in height and 0.8 mm WRMS in the horizontal at the annual frequency. Aliased loading signals are not the main source of discrepancies between loading displacement models and GPS position time series.     

Anomalous geochemical provenance and weathering history of Plio-Pleistocene glaciomarine fjord strata, Bardin Bluffs Formation, East Antarctica

Major and trace element chemical analyses of the Plio‐Pleistocene Bardin Bluffs Formation, on the margin of a major ice‐stream of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, yield an anomalous chemically altered sediment composition. The Bardin Bluffs Formation of the Pagodroma Group is one of the key deposits on the Antarctic continent recording glaciomarine sedimentation under open marine fjord conditions as recently as the Plio‐Pleistocene. In modern fjords occupied by outlet glaciers of ice sheets, the composition of fine‐grained terrigenous sediments approaches that of unweathered rock types exposed upstream. In the Bardin Bluffs Formation, average abundances of stable elements (Ti, Al, Zr) approach average upper crustal compositions and the element ratios are consistent with sediments with a cratonic source, implying glacial dispersal from a large shield area through the Lambert Glacier drainage system. Interestingly, the chemical index of alteration (CIA) of these sediments has values similar to those of average shales formed under conditions of chemical weathering. The sediments are particularly depleted in silicate Ca, which has been observed elsewhere in glacial muds sourced from pre‐glacial saprolites. The anomalous chemistry of the Bardin Bluffs Formation can be explained by a sequence of events, involving chemical weathering prior to glacial expansion and erosion. The presence of a remnant 1·5 m deep late Neogene weathering profile at the base of the Bardin Bluffs sequence corroborates this conclusion. Supply of large quantities of chemically weathered materials to Antarctic marginal basins requires at least partial deglaciation of the continent and was previously regarded as uncharacteristic for late Neogene Antarctica.     

Galactic 1.275-MeV emission from ONe novae and its detectability by INTEGRAL/SPI

Models of Galactic 1.275‐MeV emission produced by the decay of the radionuclide ²²Na have been computed. Several frequency–spatial distributions of novae have been investigated using recent results of nova rates and spatial distributions of novae in our Galaxy. These models allow us to estimate the lower limit of the ²²Na mass ejected per ONe nova detectable with the future spectrometer (SPI) of the INTEGRAL observatory as a function of the frequency–spatial distribution of ONe novae in the Galaxy. Calculations using recent estimations of the expected ²²Na mass ejected per ONe nova show that the detection of the Galactic emission of 1.275‐MeV photons will be difficult with the future spectrometer of the INTEGRAL observatory, whereas the cumulative emission around the Galactic Centre has some chance of being detected during the deep survey of the central radian of the Galaxy.